At the end of the day it's all about good faith. You either have it or you don't. It's completely obvious to me that it's ok for a product company like Apple to

At the end of the day it's all about good faith. You either have it or you don't. It's completely obvious to me that it's ok for a product company like Apple to have industry / journalism ties that they provide information ahead of time for a bigger launch day. I could go essentially any situation with marketing and that's what the ethics boil down to for me. It's simply not good faith to rig voting on a social network. I hate it when my friends ask me to upvote their HN post just because they've asked and they know I've been around here a long time. But if they write a cool post and say "hey if you like this spread it around a bit" then that is fair and I'm happy to submit it to others here. So to answer your original question: Yes, it really is less ethical and the continuum does not range from spammy to sophisticated. Spam can be quite sophisticated. They're correlated, but they're different measures and, really, a true master doesn't employ these techniques because they're playing a different, better game.